Shorty Small’s, the restaurant pictured above, is located directly across from the elementary school in Little Rock where I was once enrolled, and has been for more than three decades. When we were kids, we thought of it as the most grown-up and dangerous of grown-up and dangerous places—“a wretched hive of scum and villainy,“ to borrow the words of Obi-Wan Kenobi. A shack! Where people drink beer! With a dilapidated truck marooned on a post out front!Whatever you do, we warned each other, if the soccer ball rolls across the street during recess, do not follow it there.